Top 5 Myths to Bust to Help You Get Started with a CrossFit Program

Starting a CrossFit program can seem daunting, but it’s not worth adding to the natural stresses that comes with starting something new with information and perspectives that are simply not accurate. Below we hope to address the 5 most common myths that we hear to help you decide if you think trying CrossFit is right for you.

“I don’t want to get injured”
“Cardio is more important than BLANK” or “Strength is more important than BLANK”
“I don’t want to get too bulky”
“I’m not fit enough yet to join a class” or “I can’t even do 1 push-up, so I can’t join a class”
“I’ll mess something up and be embarrassed”

“I don’t want to get injured.”

This is one of the most common concerns we hear about starting CrossFit or programs similar to CrossFit, especially those programs that involve strength training. Injuries typically happen in one of two ways: 1) a traumatic incident like a fall or a crash or 2) overuse of a specific way of moving over time. Let’s look at each of these deeper:

Traumatic Incident - This seems to be what most people are worried about if they are considering strength training or do high intensity exercise for the first time, so let’s take a look at this. This type of injury would occur if you were lifting something heavy and thein your technique broke down in a big way. The people who tend to suffer traumatic injury from strength training are those who are prioritizing completing reps at certain weights over the technique used to complete the reps. The key perspective we use extremely minimizes the risk of this type of injury - perform your strength and power exercises at the highest level your technique can handle, called your technique threshold. As you practice and develop your technique over time, so too do you add weight and speed.

Traumatic injuries occur most often outside of the gym. During a fall, a crash, or something similar, the strength, flexibility, and resiliency of your body, along with your bone density, joint and tissue health, and how fast your body can react will have a major impact on whether or not you get injured and how serious of an injury you sustain. When something spontaneous happens to you, your body naturally flexes muscles and does things to protect you. The fitter we are, the less we get hurt in these situations. Not only that, the right type of increased fitness, that promotes fast-twitch muscle fibers and bone density, not only protects during the accident, but may actually prevent the traumatic experience from even happening in the first place.

Not all exercise is created equally. Many people view endurance activities such as running, cycling, swimming to be safer than strength training because of how people imagine getting hurt while trying to lift a weight. Something to consider though is that endurance athletes are more susceptible to overuse injury (see below) and that studies have shown that endurance athletes who do not strength train actually develop to have a higher percentage of slow-twitch muscle fibers when compared with people who don’t even work out. This dominating muscle type of slow-twitch fibers makes them incredible at their sport, going slow for a really long time, but is at the detriment of fast-twitch muscle fiber development which are extremely important for protecting against falls and injuries due to falls. We are not trying to say endurance training is bad as there are TONS of positive benefits, which is why we do a lot of endurance training in our program, but unless you are trying to be a professional endurance athlete, choosing a workout program that exposes you to strength training will develop aspects of your fitness that will carry over into resilience to injury much better.

So here’s the conundrum - people think that strength and power training will get them injured, so they do not do it, and, therefore, do not develop their fast-twitch muscle fibers and bone density in a way that makes them resilient to traumatic injury. Strength and power training is vital and with the right workout program, coaching, prioritization of technique, and mindset, can be very safe and very effective. If it wasn’t safe and extremely beneficial, we would not be doing it.

Overuse Injury - The more common type of issue people working out have is an overuse injury, which typically presents itself as nagging, localized pain caused by performing a repetitive movement at a level that the body has not yet adapted to tolerate. Our tissue and joint tolerance builds up over time, but, especially with tendons and ligaments, builds slower than most people would like. So, typically, when people are starting a new activity, they expose their muscles and joints to repetitive stresses at higher levels then their body is accustomed to. After a few weeks or months, those repetitive stresses can start causing pain. This is a major reason why 80% of runners deal with pain every year. Running is a very repetitive exercise and runners, week in and week out, tend to run, a lot. It is very easy to imagine people getting a little ahead of themselves and wanting to challenge themselves to run in amounts that their body have not yet adapted to. There are a couple of keys to minimizing the risk of an overuse injury: 1) Technique, 2) Mobility, and 3) Variance.

Technique - Different movement patterns (or different techniques for which we choose to move our bodies), do not have the same tolerance capacity. One way to think about this is that our body will have a much lower tolerance for performing an exercise with bad technique than it will have performing an exercise with good technique. So, starting out with a new workout program, but especially something like only cycling or only running which are so repetitive, can be extremely tough on new people as they have not built up a lot of tolerance for the exercises yet while at the same time they have not had enough time to practice and learn the techniques that would then boost their tolerance capacity even further. A workout program that uses a variety of exercises, using techniques functional to how our bodies have evolved to move, and organized in a way that balances workout with recovery can mitigate a lot of the overuse injury risk. Additionally, once you have built up a wide foundation of functional fitness, if you do get interested in a new sport or hobby, your base will be a tremendous buffer against overuse as you start your new activity.
Mobility - If your tissues and joints are not capable yet of functioning properly through full, functional ranges of motion, then your body will have to compensate to get the job done. The beauty of our body is that is is extremely good at compensating, so we can almost always get the job done in the moment. The issue is that over time, our mobility restrictions put us into positions and cause us to use techniques that our bodies cannot have as much tolerance for relative to the technique and positions we would choose to use if we have full ranges of motion. Mobility restrictions will increase the chance of overuse injury.
Variance - Think of tolerances as specific to a movement pattern, or specific to one way of moving our body to accomplish a task. Again, running, cycling, and rowing uses the same patterns, every time. Variance mitigates overuse injury risk in incredible ways which is why so many professional runners, cyclers, swimmers, etc. cross-train. It’s only the amateurs who tend to only run, only bike, or only row, etc. By including a variance in their program, professionals are able to continue working out and target different aspects of their fitness while not overusing movement patterns.

To sum it up, one of our major goals from our workout program, along with looking and feeling great, is to build resiliency through working out in a way that also develops

Full ranges of motion across functional movement patterns,
fast-twitch muscle fibers,
bone density,
functional technique that carries over into real life and sport.

A healthy mix of strength, endurance, and mobility, using a variety of exercises, is the best way to reduce the chance of injury in workouts and in life.

“Cardio is More Important” or “Strength is More Important.”

If you skipped over the “I don’t want to get injured” myth above, we recommend reading it as we use concepts from it to shorten our response to this misconception.

Let’s just start here: Both cardio and strength is extremely important and you do not have to choose between the two. In our opinion, leaving one of these out of an exercise program may be the biggest mistake people make.

Traditional “Cardio” like running, biking, etc., has tons of upsides: increased VO2 max (which is a measurement of how efficiently your body uses oxygen and a leading indicator of how long someone will live), increases cardiovascular health, and is extremely functional and opens up a lot of fun opportunities in life. Most of our adventures and vacations will be supported heavily by good cardio. We think cardio should play a major role in your workout program, but the downside to ONLY doing cardio is that it

takes a long time to build up a big tolerance of joints and tissues to buffer overuse injury, so it can be very hard to sustain a single modality program, like only cycling, across many years. We need to prioritize exercise for our entire lives, so a sustainable program is very important. Note, we are not saying that it cannot be sustainable, simply that because of the repetitive nature, many people starting a single modality program struggle with pain and therefor complience.
Cardio does not effectively develop bone density, fast-twitch muscle fibers, or mobility.

Along with VO2 Max, the other two leading indicators of how long someone will live are strength and muscle mass. Through some sports and through strength training (also including power training) is how fast-twitch muscle fibers are developed and maintained. Strength training is how bone density and muscle mass is developed. So, what are the cons to only strength training?

Strength training alone does not effectively develop VO2 Max which is a leading indicator of how long we will live.
Strength training does not effectively develop heart health or mobility.

What about mixing strength training and cardio? Yes and no. Many programs claim that they develop strength, but using light dumbbells and kettlebells in cardo-style workouts simply does not effectively create the stimuli required for the strength benefits discussed above. There are amazing benefits that come with mixing lifting weights and cardio together in the same workout (which is why we also do this), but most of the time, the strength benefits of this style are very minimal. This is a lot of cross-over benefits of building cardio, strength, and flexibility between each other and a lot of reasons why we mix these together a lot, but each of these also requires their own specific stimuli to properly develop that cannot occur when mixing them together all the time.

If your program is missing one of these pieces, there is not enough carry-over from the other pieces to make up for it. So, in our program, we include cardio-only pieces, strength-only pieces, mobility-only pieces, and we mix and max them a lot in a variety of different ways to optimize and maximize the benefits for our lives.

“I don’t want to get too bulky”

This misconception has been holding so many people back from working out in a way that will maximally benefit their lives. Surprisingly, building strength is not the same as building muscle mass. Although these two areas are typically correlated, one can build strength without putting on a bunch of muscle and one can have a bunch of muscle without being the strongest. Strength is more about the muscle fiber’s capacity to produce force where muscle mass is about the actual size of the muscle fibers. These two things are actually separate physiological responses. Ironically, when people don’t want to get bulky, they tend to do lighter weight and more repetitions. But, the actual way to develop strength while minimally increasing muscle size is actually do lift heavy using sets that have very few repetitions. To get bulky, one would actually do more reps and use lighter weights.

Let’s look at it this way: There are a ton of people who are trying very hard to get bulky and have not yet figured out how to do it. Another way to put it, is that those who are bulky, have worked very hard in very specific ways to try to become bulky, it just does not happen by accident. Building muscle is absolutely doable and if that’s your goal, our program provides options that will get you there, but, our program also provides options that will help you get stronger without getting too bulky.

There are styles that build strength, styles that build muscle, and styles that mix the stimuli for both, and we provide options in our program that can be personalized depending on your goals.

“I’m not fit enough yet to join a class” or “I can’t even do 1 push-up, so I can’t join a class”

We have coached thousands of beginners and we are professionals in the world of helping people, at all levels, reach their goals. Everything we do in class is customizable and scalable to your level. Each workout has specific stimuli we are targeting and for each person in the class, the exercise, weight used, and number of reps required to reach that stimuli may be different. Our goal is to help you get the most effective workouts as possible, customized to you and your level.

Not only can we adjust the number of reps and the amount of weight used, but for every exercise, we have a series of progressions that lead people towards the top level exercise. Using pull-ups as our example, we can progress through performing ring rows, banded pull-ups, jumping pull-ups, pull-up negatives, and then regular pull-ups. All exercises that can be scaled down, but that will also progress you towards the top level exercise.

The fastest, best way to get fit enough for classes, is to come to classes;)

“I’ll mess something up and be embarrassed.”

Everyone in class is busy doing their own thing and only care about surrounding themselves with people willing to try!

If you’ve never done workouts like ours before, you’re just simply not going to be amazing at it on day 1…but rest assured, you’re not supposed to be. How could you be? As new members start learning the different exercises we do, it’s common for them think that the quality of their technique is not good enough. The quality of someone's technique is simply determined by the amount and type of effort that person has put into developing it, so it makes perfect sense that almost every rep a new person performs has a lot of technical issues. Don’t worry, performing a rep with less than perfect technique will not get you injured. If everyone waited to do a rep until their technique was perfect, no one would be able to do a single rep. Reps take reps to improve. It’s important to remember that through practice with intent to improve, you will get a ton better, and fast.

Instead, here's how we want you to define a “good rep”:

Instead of doing workouts for time, for reps, for load, mostly, we use the abbreviation “FIIT” to describe the type of effort that maximizes results: Working out For Intent, Intensity, and Technique.

Your task in workouts is simple: no matter what challenge we throw at you, use the highest intensity that your technique can mostly handle - we call this threshold training: adding speed, weight, cardio demands, skill difficulty, & novelty to the point of slight technique breakdown, so we can identify what to improve, then we can focus in on it and grow.

Our workouts will challenge you in a way that develops strength, muscle, bone density, cardio, mobility, and coordination usable in real life and in sports. As you work out, prioritize trying to improve the aspects of your technique, which we'll help you identify, that inevitably need improvement. So, a “good rep” is any rep performed with high effort towards intent, intensity, and technique, regardless of what the rep actually looks like. There can be bad reps that look really good from the outside and there can be good reps that don't look that great from the outside. The key is to try to improve on your rep instead of trying to just get the rep completed.

This method creates astronomical results. Our workouts will build your capacity to perform functional movement patterns in a variety of tasks that require strength, cardio, and mobility. This mixture of intent, intensity, and technique will develop you in a way that: